Coming off eight giggly seasons as one of the title characters of "Will & Grace," a sitcom devoted to the notion that gay boys are a girl's best friend, Eric McCormack has taken to the New York stage to demonstrate that straight men are every woman's nightmare. And if an actor wants to prove that he can do heterosexual and hateable as smoothly as he can do homosexual and lovable, who better to go to than Neil LaBute, whose slight and sour comedy "Some Girl(s)" opened last night at the Lucille Lortel Theater.

As both dramatist ("Fat Pig") and filmmaker ("In the Company of Men"), Mr. LaBute has built a prolific career on vivisecting the unfair sex, with clinically contemptuous works that put the human male under a microscope and watch the little sucker squirm. Both moralistic and voyeuristic, his plays and movies seem always to be writhing in some ecstasy of self-flagellation, whispering all the while, "Oh, guys, we're bad, bad, bad — jerks, lowlife, pond scum." If there is masochism in the implicit litany, there is self-stroking smugness as well.

He has recycled this sensibility so often, and with such scant variation, that what once prompted shocked gag reflexes quickly progressed to leaving only a bitter aftertaste, which has grown milder and milder with each successive work. "Some Girl(s)," an MCC production directed by Jo Bonney, is one part LaBute bile to eight parts watery contrivance. And most of the performers — who include Mr. McCormack's fellow television alumni Fran Drescher ("The Nanny"), Maura Tierney ("E.R.") and Judy Reyes ("Scrubs"), as well as Brooke Smith, the show's standout — do little to diffuse the impression that misanthropy, in this case, breeds monotony. It's a sign that the undeniably talented Mr. LaBute needs to start mixing a new brew in that gloomy laboratory of his.

Like much of his work, "Some Girl(s)" has the formulaic precision of a scientific experiment. A man identified only as — groan — Guy (Mr. McCormack, natch), pushing 40 and finally on the verge of getting married, decides to visit former girlfriends, whom he suspects he might not have treated all that well.

These include the high school sweetheart in Seattle (Ms. Smith) he dumped just before prom night; a free-spirited sexual plaything (Ms. Reyes) in Chicago; an older, fire-and-ice college professor (Ms. Drescher) in Boston; and the woman he really loved, in Los Angeles (the appealing Ms. Tierney). That is (violins, please) if he's capable of loving anyone. "Some Girl(s)" helps you remember why the remake of "Alfie" wasn't such a good idea.

True to its schematic nature, the play unfolds in a series of interchangeable hotel rooms in different cities. Guy tries to right wrongs with old flames and keeps getting burned. You would think that after being called an emotional terrorist, who always "leaves a bunch of hurt in your boyish wake," Guy would decide to put the kibosh on this particular experiment. But like dimensionally challenged maze rats, Mr. LaBute's men refuse to learn from experience.

The visual joke of Neil Patel's single Hotel Anonymous set, which alters minimally from scene to scene, backfires, since it underscores not only the repetitiveness of Guy's love life but also the redundancy of the writing. Though the women come from different pages of type-casting directories, they each undergo a similar emotional cycle in their 20 or so minutes of stage time: defensive composure melts into revelations of enduring pain followed by a gesture of revenge that can be either small and basic (Ms. Smith's) or big and sneaky (Ms. Drescher's).

Photo

Guy (Eric McCormack) and one of his gals, Tyler (Judy Reyes).Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Since Mr. LaBute is fond of the O. Henry-ish twist, and since such calculated deceptions offer the only thing approaching surprise in "Some Girl(s)," I won't give away the little reversals that pop up like bobble-headed skeletons in funhouses. Suffice it to say that one of them involves Guy's profession. He is (and surely you've guessed) a fiction writer, of the cannibal strain, which amplifies the whisper in "Some Girl(s)" that keeps repeating, "Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa."

Of the women, Ms. Smith, who appeared to poignant effect in Louis Malle's "Vanya on 42nd Street," feels the most authentic. It helps that her character, the hometown girl who wasn't good enough for the boy with the big-city dreams, has the most credible dialogue and most convincingly wounded persona.

As Guy moves up the food chain of sophistication in his romances, his women become more and more like ornamental tools of poetic justice. You'll be happy to know that Ms. Drescher studiously avoids the strident nasality of her "Nanny" days, though her benumbed performance suggests that she has yet to find an effective substitute for creating character.

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Playing a thoughtless, woman-despising heterosexual, Mr. McCormack isn't much different from when he was playing a thoughtful, woman-worshiping homosexual. As in "Will & Grace," he italicizes every other line for maximum comic spin and punctuates his dialogue by earnestly furrowing his features.

It's certainly a more slickly sustained performance than the one delivered by another sitcom exile, David Schwimmer of "Friends," who played the same role in London last year. The right actors — and over the years, they have included Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Piven and Ben Stiller — can bring some wit and illumination to Mr. LaBute's men of bad faith.

But you don't need an Olivier to lead Mr. LaBute's chorus of self-recrimination. Once again, fellows, all together, "We are bad, bad, bad — jerks, lowlife, pond scum. ... "

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